post.apoca

It was hot and humid and unbearably sunny*; strong southern weather. I** saw him walking down the road. He was wearing a dusty brown sun hat with a wide floppy brim and denim coveralls. He had short brown-red hair and a short beard. There was dirt smudged on his face and arms. He didn't have a shirt or shoes. He was pushing a rusty shopping cart filled with all sorts of dirty fabrics and god-knows-what. I was wary; you always had to be wary of who you met those days.

I invited him over. He parked his cart on the peeling sky blue painted porch of my farmhouse, sat next to me on the bench and we ate. He only had two fingers on his right hand -- his middle and index finger. He put them together and used them like a spoon to scrape out chunks of canned peaches in syrup from a dirty can with no label and a jaggedly-cut lid. He offered me the last suck of juice from the can, with one small square piece of peach left in it. I let him scrape his fingers around the sides of the can of my own lunch -- one can of tomato paste.

He followed me inside the house. My house had a huge, fairly modern kitchen. I went rifling through the refrigerator in search of something to offer my guest. "I'm sorry," I said. The electricity has been out for a long time so most everything is spoiled. I haven't had the heart to throw it all out." I pushed past half-open packages of hot dogs and old cheese. There was one white plastic package -- it felt like half a pair in syrup -- that I held for a moment, but then I put it back. I thought mom might be angry if the man and I ate it. I stood up, shut the door to the fridge, and turned around. The strange man had been busy at the stove. He had cooked a giant omelette and a plate of pancakes. "We had eggs?" I thought to myself, surprised.

Then the electricity flickered once. It flickered again, and we heard a huge rumbling noise throughout the house. "Oh, that's just the air conditioner turning on." I said. It took a minute for the implications of this to hit me. Electricity! I ran to the huge stainless steel unit on the wall and franticly pressed the buttons. I pressed a large round power button. The unit had a giant tv attached to it, and it roared to life, showing only static. I pressed the button again, and suddenly we were being shown a professional football game.

"WHAT??" the man roared, enraged. He pushed me back against the refridgerator. "You didn't tell me what it was still like out there!"*** He put his hands around my throat. He was wide-eyed and savage. I was confused. I looked at the screen; most of the stadium was empty, but there were some people there, in the stands, and the game was happening. "I didn't know!" I cried. I managed to escape his grasp and ran out the door of the house. I ran alongside the porch and started into the pine forest behind it.

"You'll be back," shouted the man. "You'll come in through the window or something. You have to. And I'll be here waiting." I knew he was right.

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NOTES ABOUT THIS DREAM

* This is remarkable in that I very rarely have dreams in which there is strong sunlight. This might be because this was a midday nap dream and therefore my nap environment was sunnier than my usual sleep environment.

** The "I" in my dream was me, but it was not me in my actual, physical body. The "I" I identified with in the dream was a young caucasian male, late 20's to early 30's, living in the country. There's no "evidence" in the dream to prove this other than my own strong feeling that that is who I was.

***something to this effect. what he was referring to was the relatively 'normalcy' of people going to see a professional sporting event while we were essentially living as if society itself had completely crumbled

nm

I had a nightmare last night. It was either the repeat of a nightmare I've had before, greatly expanded, or it just felt like deja vu in my dream. Anyway, at the end of it, I was about to confront the person upon whom the nightmare was based around. I heard her making noises about the other end of the abandoned building in the sea where we were searching for her. I was outside on some sort of fire escape/balcony/whatever on the side of the house, while my compatriots were further inside in an unlit room that looked like it belonged to a little girl. I tried throwing lightbulbs down at the girl we were looking forward, but whenever I threw them they weren't making the noise of breaking glass. I then tried to scream at her, or at my company, but I couldn't get anything out. I tried harder and harder until I woke up making this godawful whistling noise in the back of my throat.

nightmare

We were all hanging out together, a bunch of friends, with hottie professor at his house. We had all been drinking. Hottie professor turned to look at me, and he said something, I can't remember what it was, but I remember the feeling in my gut as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice in it. He had been sitting indian style, myself sitting next to him, and I stood up and started backing away. As I was doing this he twisted at his stomach, turning towards the left to look around at me. He got up and started stepping towards me, an evil look on his face. I remember screaming out "Do you know what I was going to do to you? I was going to fuck you! I was going to fuck you so hard your eyes rolled in the back of your head!" I was trying to hurt him, to say things to him to assert that I had some sort of power, not to show that he had hurt me. He threw his head back and laughed, and then lunged toward me and tried to grab me. I screamed and ran outside. He followed me. It felt like I was fifteen years old again, sleeping with my bedroom door locked and a baseball bat buried in the blankets with me, praying this wouldn't be the night my stepdad snapped.

So pretty much this nightmare was a combination of all my deep-rooted fears of alcoholism and older men?

bad dreaammss

For some reason, especially in the last two years or so, I've become more and more susceptible to having entirely vivid dreams. Also, to remember a lot of them

Lately I've been having dreams that, while not up to the category of "nightmare," have definitely started rambling into the realm of slow horror. I just woke up from a nap. In my dream, I was in a house that sort of was like where I live now but much bigger. I was living with some other people I don't know, who belonged to a family that lived in a house above us. Apparently they had been having major family issues, as in, like, evil beating parents and all the kids were fucked up in a really pseudo-religious sort of way. Skip ahead a little bit -- I walked around the corner in my house and looked at the stairs, and one of the girls from the other family had hung herself in the stairwell. She was wearing a dark blue dress and her dark brown hair was done up in pigtailed braids.

I remember just feeling shocked, and I walked back and hid on my back porch (which, at this point, was screened in) when some other people (maybe Jodie, definitely Laurence) came in. I asked them if they had seen the girl and they said yes. Laurence said he had called the paramedics. He said they were gonna be pissed because everything in the house was such a mess. And then he asked if we knew about (insert name here), that he was really a serial rapist and was actually the father figure for the strange family. More shock. Then we started finding out that someone had planted drugs all over the house, and everyone was really freaking out about it.

I'm not really sure what spawned that dream. Or last night's, where mostly what I remember is a very terrifying boat ride on this wooden boat riding down a brown, tempestuous river, and stumbling upon these people whose limbs had been eaten off to the joints.

weird.